Skinner’s Quote of the Day
Cumulative Record. Chapter 46: How to Teach Animals. Quote 9
… you can make it appear that a pigeon can be taught to read. You simply use two printed cards bearing the words PECK and DON’T PECK, respectively. By reinforcing responses to PECK and blacking out when the bird pecks DON’T PECK, it is quite easy to train the bird to obey the commands on […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 46: How to Teach Animals. Quote 5
The second thing you will need [to test a teaching technique] is something your subject wants, say food. This serves as a reward or—to use a term which is less likely to be misunderstood—a “reinforcement” for the desired behavior. (p. 605)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 46: How to Teach Animals. Quote 4
“Catch your rabbit” is the first item in a well-known recipe for rabbit stew. Your first move, of course, [to test a teaching technique] is to choose an experimental subject. Any available animal—a cat, a dog, a pigeon, a mouse, a parrot, a chicken, a pig—will do. (p. 605)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 45: John Broadus Watson, Behaviorist. Quote 8
… Watson was to be remembered for a long time, by both laymen and psychologists alike, for a too narrow interpretation of self-observation, for an extreme environmentalism, and for a coldly detached theory of child care, no one of which was a necessary part of his original program. His brilliant glimpse of the need for, […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 45: John Broadus Watson, Behaviorist. Quote 7
[Watson] thought he saw the seeds of many behavior problems in early home experiences, and in his Psychological Care of the Infant and Child—a book he later publicly regretted—he cautioned parents against the unconsidered display of affection. (Current “mother love” theories are the other swing of that pendulum.) (p. 603)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 45: John Broadus Watson, Behaviorist. Quote 6
The same taste for polemics led him into an extreme environmentalistic position . . . Like all those who want to do something about behavior, he had emphasized the possibility of environmental modification, and this was widely misunderstood. Under the stress of battle he was led at last to the well-known cry: “Give me a […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 45: John Broadus Watson, Behaviorist. Quote 2
In establishing the continuity of species Darwin had attributed mental processes to lower organisms . . . The inevitable reaction was epitomized in the writings of Lloyd Morgan, who argued that such evidences of mental processes could be explained in other ways. A third step was inevitable, and it was Watson who took it: If […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 45: John Broadus Watson, Behaviorist. Quote 1
[John Broadus Watson’s] place in the history of science, and something of his stature, are indicated by three names—Darwin, Lloyd Morgan, and Watson—which represent three critical changes in our conception of behavior. (p. 601)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 41: A Second Type of “Superstition” in the Pigeon. Quote 2
If, on the other hand, reinforcements happen to occur relatively infrequently in the presence of A, a discrimination will develop in the opposite direction, as the result of which the rate in the presence of A will be relatively low—a sort of negative sensory superstition. (p. 576)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 41: A Second Type of “Superstition” in the Pigeon. Quote 1
. . . a stimulus present when a response is reinforced may acquire discriminative control over the response even though its presence at reinforcement is adventitious . . . This might be called a positive sensory superstition. (p. 575)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 40: “Superstition” in the Pigeon. Quote 4
When we arrange a clock to present food every 15 sec., we are in effect basing our reinforcement upon a limited set of responses which frequently occur 15 sec. after reinforcement. When a response has been strengthened (and this may result from one reinforcement), the setting of the clock implies an even more restricted contingency. […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 40: “Superstition” in the Pigeon. Quote 3
The experiment might be said to demonstrate a sort of superstition. The bird behaves as if there were a causal relation between its behavior and the presentation of food, although such a relation is lacking. There are many analogies in human behavior. (p. 573)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 40: “Superstition” in the Pigeon. Quote 2
Whenever we present a state of affairs which is known to be reinforcing at a given level of deprivation, we must suppose that conditioning takes place even though we have paid no attention to the behavior of the organism in making the presentation. (p. 570)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 40: “Superstition” in the Pigeon. Quote 1
To say that a reinforcement is contingent upon a response may mean nothing more than that it follows the response . . . conditioning takes place presumably because of the temporal relation only, expressed in terms of the order and proximity of response and reinforcement. (p. 570)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 39: Some Quantitative Properties of Anxiety. Quote 1
Anxiety has at least two defining characteristics: (1) it is an emotional state, somewhat resembling fear, and (2) the disturbing stimulus which is principally responsible does not precede or accompany the state but is “anticipated” in the future. (p. 559)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 35: Two Types of Conditioned Reflex and a Pseudo-type. Quote 3
… the magnitude of the response in an operant is not a measure of its strength. Some other measure must be devised, and from the definition of an operant it is easy to arrive at the rate of occurrence of the response. This measure has been shown to be significant in a large number of […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 35: Two Types of Conditioned Reflex and a Pseudo-type. Quote 2
But there is also a kind of response which occurs spontaneously in the absence of any stimulation with which it may be specifically correlated … It is the nature of this kind of behavior that it should occur without an eliciting stimulus, although discriminative stimuli are practically inevitable after conditioning. It is not necessary to […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 35: Two Types of Conditioned Reflex and a Pseudo-type. Quote 1
There is, first, the kind of response which is made to specific stimulation, where the correlation between response and stimulus is a reflex in the traditional sense. I shall refer to such a reflex as a respondent and use the term also as an adjective in referring to the behavior as a whole. (p. 537)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 34: The Generic Nature of the Concepts of Stimulus and Response. Quote 6
Our rule that the generic term may be used only when its experimental reality has been verified will not admit the possibility of an ancillary principle, available in and peculiar to the study of behavior, leading to the definition of concepts through some other means than the sort of experimental procedure here outlined. (p. 521)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 34: The Generic Nature of the Concepts of Stimulus and Response. Quote 4
[The] restriction upon the use of the popular vocabulary in behaviorism is often not felt because the partial legitimacy of the popular term frequently results in some experimental consistency. (pp. 520-521)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 34: The Generic Nature of the Concepts of Stimulus and Response. Quote 3
. . . the existence of a popular term does create some presumption in favor of the existence of a corresponding experimentally real concept. But this does not free us from the necessity of defining the class and of demonstrating the reality if the term is to be used for scientific purposes. It has still […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 34: The Generic Nature of the Concepts of Stimulus and Response. Quote 2
The generic nature of stimulus and response is in no sense a justification for the broader terms of the popular vocabulary. We may lay it down as a general rule that no property is a valid defining property of a class until its experimental reality has been demonstrated. This excludes a great many terms commonly […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 34: The Generic Nature of the Concepts of Stimulus and Response. Quote 1
The analysis of behavior is not an act of arbitrary subdividing, and we cannot define the concepts of stimulus and response quite as simply as “parts of behavior and environment” without taking account of the natural lines of fracture along which behavior and environment actually break. (p. 504)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 33: The Concept of the Reflex in the Description of Behavior. Quote 6
… we may now take that more humble view of explanation and causation which seems to have been first suggested by Mach and is now a common characteristic of scientific thought, wherein, in a word, explanation is reduced to description and the notion of function substituted for that of causation. (pp. 494-495)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 33: The Concept of the Reflex in the Description of Behavior. Quote 4
The definition of the subject matter of any science, however, is determined largely by the interest of the scientist, and this will be our safest rule here. We are interested primarily in the movement of an organism in some frame of reference. (p. 494)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 33: The Concept of the Reflex in the Description of Behavior. Quote 3
Lacking some arbitrary distinction, the term behavior must include the total activity of the organism—the functioning of all its parts. Obviously, its proper application is much less general, but it is difficult to reach any clear distinction. (p. 494)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 33: The Concept of the Reflex in the Description of Behavior. Quote 1
The operational analysis of Sherrington’s synapse and the more generalized statement . . . in which I suggested that C.N.S. might be taken to stand for the Conceptual Nervous System, have been interpreted as showing an anti-physiological or anti-neurological bias. I was, however, merely protesting the use of inferences from behavior to explain behavior, while […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 32: Why Are the Behavioral Sciences Not More Effective. Quote 26
Perhaps human behavior can be controlled via the environment, but who will exert the control? . . . What [those who ask that question] should be asking is: “What kinds of cultural contingencies induce people to engage in the control of other people? Under what contingencies do people act like tyrants? Under what contingencies do […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 32: Why Are the Behavioral Sciences Not More Effective. Quote 25
Governments still hold the individual responsible and are said to be best if they govern least, because a person is then free to behave well because of inner virtues. All this continues to divert attention from the task of building a social environment in which people behave well with respect to each other, acquire effective […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 32: Why Are the Behavioral Sciences Not More Effective. Quote 24
And industry still selects workers who are industrious, skilled, and careful; it has not given serious attention to the design of contingencies under which everyone works hard and carefully and enjoys his work. (p. 473)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 32: Why Are the Behavioral Sciences Not More Effective. Quote 23
In psychotherapy, the medical analogy persists: the problem is mental illness, and it is the patient who must be cured. The therapist tries to reach his patient by making an interpersonal contact, not by changing an environment. (p. 473)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 32: Why Are the Behavioral Sciences Not More Effective. Quote 21
New practices in child care, in the management of institutionalized retardates and psychotics, in individual psychotherapy, in classroom management, in the design of incentive systems in industry and elsewhere are being tested. We are, I think, on our way to the technology we need to solve many of our problems. But progress is dishearteningly slow […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 32: Why Are the Behavioral Sciences Not More Effective. Quote 20
It is hard to imagine a group of young people more completely out of control of the culture of their country [than young offenders living in a school for juvenile delinquents]. But they are not out of control of their own culture, and they may be brought under the control of a better one. (p. […]